


The Taste of the Blade

by campylobacter, dciphoenix



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Angst, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Psychological Torture, Sexual Coercion, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-27
Updated: 2015-07-28
Packaged: 2018-04-11 12:21:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4435292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/campylobacter/pseuds/campylobacter, https://archiveofourown.org/users/dciphoenix/pseuds/dciphoenix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hunting down all of Ba'al's clones comes at too dear a price for both Daniel and Vala.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Distant Crash

**Author's Note:**

> Set after "The Ark of Truth" and before "Continuum".
> 
> Began with DCIPhoenix's imagery of lace curtains in a beached spaceship, and grew into Ba'al's favorite hobby.

He finds her in a windowless Goa'uld mothership as she's dreaming of lace curtains swirling in a warm afternoon breeze. She dreams of buzzing insects over her corpse in a sea of long grass. He finds her lying on a cold marble floor, surrounded by golden urns and shiny faience figurines, but her ears are filled with the distant crash of ocean waves. Salted tracks from her open eyes etch lines in the gold dust on her cheeks. Her fingers twist in the translucent weave of her dress. 

"Go away," she pleads as he kneels down to make sure she's alive. 

He keeps silent, untangling her hands from the fabric of sheer skirt panels. 

"No, don't touch me," she groans, recoiling from him. "Don't make me her host. Please." 

"Vala, it's me, Daniel." 

"Please don't." She heaves herself up and away from him. "I'll do whatever you ask, just keep her away from me." 

"Vala, I'm not Ba'al. I'm Daniel. Daniel Jackson." He lays a gentle hand on her bare shoulder, trying not to catch his fingers in the hundreds of intricate strands of tiny gold and opal beads criss-crossing her upper body. "I'm here to bring you home." 

"He murdered you. I saw it, I heard you screaming." 

"No Vala, you know he lies. I'm alive. I'm here to take you away from all that. Come with me. I won't let him hurt you anymore. But we have to leave now." 

She pushes his hand off her and starts pacing. "If I try to escape, he'll kill you. Over and over. I can't watch anymore." She avoids looking him in the eye. When she switches direction in her pacing, Daniel pulls a zat from his waistband. He aims and fires. As she staggers to her knees, he catches her before her head hits the floor. She becomes limp in his arms, head lolled back, throat long and exposed as he gathers her close. 

Now Daniel's unsure of himself. He's trying to remember yesterday. This morning? Two weeks ago? His memories slip away whenever he tries to focus on a single moment. 

"Arranged marriages are something of the norm…" he muses aloud, fighting to anchor those overpowering, stray words into a logical memory. He recalls an arranged marriage… with Vala? Qetesh? Sarah? Sha're? 

Vala's so still and silent in his arms, no answers coming from lips pale and parted. 

Did he wake up mere hours ago in a sarcophagus? If Ba'al repeatedly killed him and revived him, wouldn't he remember? 

_If you were really my friend and had the power to stop it, you'd stop it!_ Jack's voice echoes somewhere in his head. _You can put an end to it._

Jack had told him about similar torture at the hands of the very same System Lord, how it had unraveled the colonel's sanity to the point of no hope of rescue, wanting to die once and for all. Now it's Vala who's lost hope, but Daniel's lost his memory. Again. He has no recollection of being Ascended, just as he has no immediate recollection of how he came aboard this mothership. 

His eyes drift to the wealth of ornate gold hieroglyphs on the bulkheads leading into the depths of the Ha’tak. Long hair masks her face, preventing him from feeling more guilt over zatting her. He touches anxious fingertips to her throat to reassure himself that she's alive despite the odors of smoke and death Ba'al had left behind. Careful to leave no sound of footsteps, he exits her sumptuous prison with her limp in his arms. 

She starts to come round as soon as Daniel settles her in the middle of the ring transporter. She frowns accusingly as she realizes where she is. 

He shakes his head. “I can’t just leave you here. Either we both leave, or none of us do.” 

A metallic _woosh_ slices through the air between his ear and shoulder, severing his thoughts in two. His mind stops and divides as coldness seeps in, followed by blankness, blackness. 

“You murdering bastard,” Vala cries. 

Ba’al smirks and raises his Shikra Blade. 

Vala’s tears of despair turn red. 


	2. Sweeter

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was a longer chapter at one time, but [went too far](http://www.wired.com/2015/06/rape-scenes/) beyond the Mature rating, so it's short again.

She feels the kiss of the blade up her spine, over each and every vertebra before it mercifully stops at the nape of her neck.

"Just get it over with." Vala grits her teeth. "You make me sick."

Lies on her tongue have never tasted more sweet.

The Shikra Blade snips the flimsy fabric off her back.

Replacing the cold, sharp metal are lips venomous with warmth against the soft skin of her shoulder. As he moves upward, the hairs of his beard leave a trail of dangerous anticipation along her neck.

His palms graze her bared sides as teeth nip at her throat. She holds her breath as he grabs each breast and presses his body against her back, his arousal unmistakable through his clothing.

"I've forgotten how good that feels," Vala sighs, hating herself.

"I'm only happy you've finally come to your senses," he says. "Took you long enough."

* * *

Later, she finds Daniel inside a sarcophagus, calling out for his dead wife, for their arranged marriage. He's shivering, freezing cold despite wearing desert BDUs. She can predict the way his anguished cries will twist her inside — not from jealousy, but from helplessness. She can't restore his mind, his memories, his delirium, no matter how desperately she wishes.

She fights against lifting him out, holding him, comforting him. Because it's what Ba'al expects her to do. It's always a different torture, but the same pain. Yet Ba'al's broken her just past the razor's edge; she won't let him give her to Qetesh.

Fighting against her first instinct to run, run, always run, she resolves to stand and fight. There's nothing to left to lose; Daniel's rescue is an illusion, their lives re-used, disposable nightmares.

She grabs the zat gun on the floor — they always leave it there for her and Daniel to use against each other, while Ba'al and his Jaffa are shielded from its specific frequency. But the shift in wavelength also makes it more disruptive to data stored in hexaclinic crystals.

Left, down the corridor to the engineering core. Right turn toward the cloaking control panel. Duck behind a rack of crystals to avoid the technicians. Aim for the array with two red crystals and one blue adjacent… and fire. Pray that SG-1 detects Ba'al's de-cloaked ship...


	3. That I Craved

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dealing with the aftertaste of pain...

Blanketing herself over him, Vala feels his hand in her hair, but tells herself that she's imagining it. Daniel caresses her neck. "Stop crying. Please. I'm okay now."

"No... Why?" She grimaces, her cheek against his infirmary shirt, Vala curls herself tighter around his body.

"Because it's killing me," he hisses, pushing her back just far enough to make eye contact.

"You were so cold when they first brought you in," she whispers. Daniel feels her shiver, feels her tears slide down his neck and collar-bone, feels her barely weigh anything once again as she shifts herself to say the next words, louder: "I thought I'd lost you." 

"And you'll never lose me. Never." Forehead against hers, hesitant fingers brush stray tears from her face. They both know the promise is conditional as long as they can draw breath, or as long as torture doesn't destroy their minds.

"Not to death, Daniel." She twists her fingers in the faded fabric of her medical gown. "To you finding out that I enjoyed it, that I begged him for it, that I craved him. Even though I didn't want to. I swear it."

"I may know exactly how you feel. Hathor didn't spare my body or my mind when she did the same thing to me."

"Hathor? Ra's former queen?" Vala raises her head to look Daniel in the eye. "When Hathor disappeared millennia ago, Qetesh took over her holdings."

"I thought Mitchell made you read all the mission reports—"

"I'm working through them backwards, but I'm only halfway through! And to be quite honest, yours are boring and wordy, Samantha's are dry and technical, Teal'c's are short with little detail, and as for General O'Neill's—"

Daniel chuckles. "Colonel O'Neill, at the time."

"And as for Jack's mission reports, they're the most entertaining, but also the most difficult to make sense of."

He sighs and shrugs. "The first foothold situation with Hathor was one of the hardest incident reports I'd ever written, but then, it was maybe my tenth or eleventh one, so…"

"I don't wanna talk about mission reports or Qetesh or Hathor right now." Vala shakes her head vehemently, causing her hair to fall forward.

"Me neither."

"I just want to listen to this," she says, putting her head on his chest.

Daniel takes a deep breath and wraps his arms around her. He lets himself relax, and inhales the scent of ocean waves and incense in her hair.

She closes her eyes, and doesn't dream of lace curtains or buzzing insects or golden urns, but instead fills her ears with the nearby rhythm of Daniel's heart.


End file.
